This took too long but I feel very good that I made it work. I started with Ubuntu 18.04.3 as a total newbie. Got QEMU-KVM installed. And setup my first bridge to the network interface on the server, thus allowing the VM's to connect outside. Feels good to learn.

Next step in learning from the ground up the whole linux sysadmin side of things (as a way of helping me learn more about how to admin a windows environment more deeply) is to remove this from our network, place it into it's own VLAN so it won't harm anything on our network, isolate it basically, and somehow get that to be a DMZ'd VLAN out to the internet, so I can create a virtual network using VM's and everything else. Using this guide as a rough guideline, but trying to modernize it and do it all in Ubuntu instead: